Description

A game of timing for 2 or 4 players and a piecepack

In this game, players use their die as a timer; this timer is fed by coins, whose values indicate the amount of turns it will take to trigger a score. Scoring depends on the facing of the tiles around the pawns on the board – which is constantly changing, since the tiles rotate on each turn unless they are pinned by the pawns. This way, dice and tiles are constantly moving in and out of phase with each other.

The game will be won by the player with the highest score after all the timers have stopped and there are no more coins left to feed them.

Rules

License

Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International

Reviews

Desfases is the most mechanically innovative game in the contest, and therefore takes the Silver. A game of Desfases is almost literally dizzying; as the players' pawns zip around, every tile on the board rotates at a different, player-controlled rate, spinning now faster, now slower, depending on events in the game.

The object of Desfases is to claim as many high-scoring tiles as possible, but you can only score them if they're pointing toward you when you land your pawn next to them, and all too often they're desfases ("out of phase") from your pawn, thanks to your opponents. All this spinning and skipping around the board while trying to score a sweet tile makes for a highly tactical experience, much like (I imagine) trying to land a jet on an aircraft carrier on a windy, choppy day. Then again, at times I felt like a hovering hummingbird, waiting for a blossom to open.

We mostly played four-player Desfases, which is great. Alas, we found the three-player version of Desfases to be unplayable. However, the two-player version is even deeper than the four-player version. I had the pleasure of having various bloody chunks of my anatomy handed to me by playtester Jami, who developed her two pawns (in a four-player game, you only get one), so that she could block my pieces with one pawn and score with the other, or pin tiles in place with her blue pawn so she could score them with her black pawn, and then reverse their roles. Very adept. What other strategies and tactics does this game hide?

One refinement we adopted was to flip tiles over when they're scored, so that we could more easily navigate the available tiles and to remind us not to spin them. It's also important to remember to spin tiles at the beginning of each turn, so we all took responsibility to remind each other to do it.

I recommend both the four-player and two-player games highly. Play is easy to learn while containing tactical depth, and the tile-spinning mechanism is unusual and innovative. Congratulations, Antonio!